The Myth of Tumblr Train

If it is too good to be true..

Tumblr followers are hard to get. I know a lot of people have had an account for sometime and posted over a hundred posts and still have only a handful of followers. On tumblr you would frequently see people talking about "promotion" which I still do not understand. How are they going to "promote" you if their posts barely get a few notes? An interesting thing about Tumblr is that they don't show how many followers you have. Therefore anybody can claim to have a lot of followers. However, if you are experienced enough, you can easily tell if the person is for real. I will show you some numbers from my personal experience.

I have heard people mentioning something called "Tumblr train." I quit half way through the setup process because there are just things that do not add up. First of all, they do not tell you how it works! All they say is that you have to follow them, and you will get tons of followers! I wish things are that simple. So I took a closer look into a youtube video about Tumblr train. The video was posted in January of 2012. In the video, the guy shows 75 visitors online and total follower was over 50,000. I follow the description link to his blog. I took a look at his own posts (not reblogs from others). What do I see? I see plenty of posts with 1-10 notes!

First of all, when you look at a post, you can see the "source" of the post. If the source is different from the blog name, it's a reblog, meaning the high note counts do not come from the poster mostly. So you have to look at his own posts. Remember, the youtube video is 8 months old when he had 50K followers. With a "domino" effect, the follower count should be "ridiculous" by now. Even if he has not gained any followers in the past 8 months..?

I have a total 25,000 followers (7 accounts combined, unique). Whenever I post something, I can easily end up with an average of 50 notes in a few hours (and I do not reblog myself). So with 50,000 followers, how do you consistently have posts that have 1-10 notes? (Those posts are not those "boring" ones, according to my experience.) One of my Tumblr gigs is to reblog your Tumblr post to my followers. Unless the post is an obvious ad, or something really boring, it usually ends up with an average gain of 50 notes, with some best performers gaining 600+ notes.

Unless someone can explain it to me, I tend to conclude that tumblr train is "too good to be true" or the followers are simply not genuinely interested in your posts. Either way, it's not going to be useful. When something does not make sense, it's probably not true.

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g37752 5 years ago

I am the opposite. I couldnt really get twitter to work. I have been doing ok on tumblr netting $2200+/month, a month ago using mass liking alone, which unfortunately was killed by tumblr. most of my other tumblr gigs are still working well.

As for twitter, i got frustrated when people complained about me following them! What i dont understand is if they follow people about e.g., "ebay" and i talk about "ebay" also. what's there to complain about.. and those are not even bot following! i then tried retweet but saw no results after 1st attempt. I am able to login twitter so I am "almost capable of" doing something, but dont even know what I can do!?

There is some difference between tumblr and twitter - tumblr is basically picture only. it's hard to get attention with texts, unless it's short quotes or jokes, and they have to be presented as images too. Perhaps thats why you cant get it to work on tumblr?

Gamerelated 5 years agofrom California

I am one of those people that have a decent amount of posts, but really no followers. I am doing ok on Twitter and ok here, but I have not been able to get followers on Tumblr. Whatever I do here and on Twitter just doesn't work on Tumblr. I was about to joined Tumblr train as well and I quit halfway through as well because it seemed fishy to me as well.